Monday, 7 April 2014

The Great Phone Epidemic – Part 1

The Great Phone Epidemic – Part 1

Claire - April 7, 2014

6:15am
on a cold Monday morning in the middle of winter back in 2003. It was my very
first day as a Technical Chiropractic Assistant. As the team gathered around
the appointment book and started finding the patient files in the cabinet for the
mornings appointments, a group began to gather on the veranda outside. I looked
out to see tradies, people in suits and a couple in gym gear waiting for us to
open. They were chatting and laughing among themselves and it continued as they
filed inside and sat in the “hot seat” area. The music was cranked up,
adjusting began, the talking increased, the energy sky-rocketed and it felt
like a party. I thought to myself, ”Wow this is the best place in the world to
be on a Monday morning. This place rocks.”

It was
an amazingly busy practise and every adjusting set seemed the same. People made
friends with those that had appointments around the same time and the party
atmosphere was the standard. There were kids happily playing in the kid’s
corner or running back and forth to show mum the plastic cow. Not only did it
feel good being there, what I saw in the way of changes to people’s health was
phenomenal.

Fast
forward to today and “Hot Seat” areas in Chiropractic offices all over the
world look very different during adjusting time. The music is still there, the
people are still there but the energy has changed and the conversation has all
but stopped. Now as soon as bottoms hit the seat, the phones come out and the
focus is directed at the world of social media, games, emails, text messages…
anything but the physical environment. This is the same on the train, in coffee
shops, on the beach, at the family dinner table; there seems to no situation
where the phone doesn’t make an appearance. We are spending so much energy
connecting with people virtually that it appears we are losing sight of those
immediately around us.

It is
not just the teenagers falling into this pattern, older people do it, parents
do too, kids and even toddlers and babies are handed the phone to stop them
from communicating.

This
phone epidemic is starting to have a huge impact on our health as a society and
in a number of different ways. Spending hours interacting with our phones is
changing not only how we interact with other actual people, but also our
posture, our hormonal systems, our neurology, our immune systems and even down
to our cellular biology. Over the next few blog posts we are going to
explore some of these serious effects of the phone epidemic.